Page 35 of Tribulation Pass

“You’ve always been perceptive,” Atticus said. “An excellent trait in my line of work.”

“Mine too,” Duncan said. “How long are you going to stall?”

“Long enough for Hattie to get some color back in her cheeks. Drink some of that water, kiddo.”

Hattie nodded, happy to let Atticus take the lead. She had no idea where to even start.

“Her father was one of my closest friends,” Atticus said. “As close as a brother, and I would’ve done anything for him. He’d been sick for a while before he finally went to the doctor, and by then the cancer was too far spread. He was gone within the month.”

Hattie felt the tears on her cheeks. He’d been a larger-than-life presence who never showed weakness. And then he’d been gone in the blink of an eye.

“Harry’s last request had been that I take care of his daughter, and I didn’t do that,” Atticus said. “Not like I should have. Hattie was only twenty-four when Harry died, and she would inherit a whole lot of money, plus shares in her father’s company. But she’d already been dating Derek Bancroft for a year before Harry’s death, and I figured Harry had already run a full background check on him. Maybe he did, but Derek came from a wealthy family and had an Ivy League degree. They seemed happy enough so I didn’t press, figuring Hattie would need whatever comfort she could get since she wouldn’t get it from her mother. I’ve never met a colder woman. No offense,” he said to Hattie.

“You speak the truth,” Hattie said. “I’ve often wondered, and prayed, that she wasn’t really my biological mother, but the resemblance is too strong to think otherwise.”

Atticus had been standing ramrod straight in front of the fireplace, and he finally relaxed his posture and massaged the back of his neck. And then he sat in the club chair across from them. The weariness in his eyes was almost her undoing.

“I’m sorry I didn’t check in with you after Harry’s death,” he said. “I’ve lost friends and agents my entire career. It’s part of the job. But I was not prepared for what losing Harry would be like. Work was the easiest way to escape. The irony is it was me working like a demon that brought the wrath of God down on me. I made a lot of people mad during that time. And my wife and daughter paid the price for it.”

Hattie swallowed hard and looked away from the raw grief on Atticus’s face. “Derek is a high-powered attorney. And he knows how to play the long game. He was a fantastic actor. Everything a father could want for his daughter. He was smart and successful. He was charming and lavished me with gifts and attention. We were quite the thing in social circles. He loved that part. The attention.

“I have a master’s degree in business and my father had been training me to run the company one day. And by one day, I mean a couple of decades down the road. None of us were prepared for it to be so soon.

“When my father got sick, things were in total chaos.” She stopped to take a drink of water. “The board shoving papers in front of my face to sign. I was numb. And then Derek told me he’d visited my father in the hospital because he wanted to ask him properly to marry me. He made things so easy, and I just let him take control. It wasn’t like me at all, but I was just so tired and so broken.”

Duncan took her hand and she looked down, surprised to see his fingers entwined with her own. She took a deep breath, knowing she had to press on.

“I felt like a zombie,” she said. “Or like I was underwater. He’d told me my father asked that we get married there at the hospital, so he could still give me away. I couldn’t say no to that. So we got our marriage license and the day before my father died in that hospital bed Derek and I got married.”

Her breath hitched, but she held back the sobs that wanted to break free.

“My father hadn’t even been lucid during the ceremony,” she said. “Derek told me later that he had asked my father to marry me, but do you know what my dad told him? He told him he wouldn’t give his blessing. He suggested we wait another year because a man can pretend to be something he’s not for two full years before things start to come to the surface.”

“Your dad was a wise man,” Atticus said. “And what he told Derek is true. That must have put him in panic mode.”

“It was all lies,” Hattie said. “The wedding was a final insult to a dying man. He hated my father. But he loved the idea of a billion-dollar company and all that entailed. And I went along with it, believing it was what my father wanted. I was so stupid.”

“No one could fault you for grieving, Hattie,” Duncan said. “You can’t blame yourself. All you could do at the time was survive. And that’s what you did.”

She laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Survive. I barely did that. After my father died everything was moved and shifted around quickly. We’re a global defense company, and the last thing we could show was weakness. The funeral was delayed almost a week so my mother could fly in from where she’d been vacationing in the south of France. She’d never bothered to visit him in the hospital. And she was definitely not a grieving widow. She brought her latest boyfriend to the funeral.”

“I don’t think I like your mother,” Duncan said.

“Most people don’t,” she said. “Immediately after the funeral they gathered us all for the reading of the will. Atticus was there too.”

“It was a moment I’ll never forget,” he said. “Hattie’s mother thought that she’d be given majority shares in the company. That had been the terms of the original will. She was a brilliant businesswoman, and it was her father’s company merged with Harry’s that had made it such a success. Harry was a man who played fair, and despite her blatant disregard for their marriage vows and the way she treated Hattie, he wasn’t going to cut her out completely. Harry believed in legacy, and no matter how he felt about his wife, her father had helped build the company. So he left her a third of the shares.”

“Which is not a majority,” Duncan said, wincing.

Atticus nodded. “Harry left a third to me and a third to Hattie. The rest of his estate and homes also went to Hattie.”

“When they read the will she went into a fit of rage, and the estate attorney had to go to the hospital to get stitches. She contested the will, of course, but there was nothing she could do. She did manage to tie up all of the assets that were left to me, but that didn’t matter because Dad had put them in a trust until I turn thirty-five anyway. I didn’t need any of that. I make a good salary from the company and it was always more than enough.

“What I hadn’t realized was that Derek and my mother had been plotting and planning together. They’d met long before he and I started dating. They’d even been lovers for a time. And they both had one goal. They were the good cop and the bad cop. The more abusive and vile she became toward me, the closer I moved toward Derek. He promised me he could keep me safe from my mother. That she’d never get what my father had left me. He was an attorney and all I had to do was trust him to handle the details.”

Hattie took another drink of water and looked at Duncan. His face had gone pale, but he waited for her to finish.

“After the reading of the will he took me out of the country to rest and so we could honeymoon properly.” She had difficulty choosing the words she’d say next. “You see, we’d never been together in that way before. He’d always been a gentleman and respected my decision to wait until marriage.

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